How to Do a DotA Commentary

If you think you are just watching too much
DotA commentary and are bored/sick/tired of the commentator's accent and what
so ever. You can easily make you own DotA commentary and upload onto Youtube or
other video sharing websites. It is very easy and you should believe me.

Things You Will Need

Step 1

Search for good DotA replays

It is very very important to search good
DotA replay. If the replay do not have exciting gank fight/team fight/turning
points, then do not bother about them any more. Normally what I will do is to
look through what competitions are going on currently (ADC, WCG, et), usually
the highly competitive competition do have a lot of good replays which are
freely distributed.

Step 2

Analyse the replay

Before doing the actual recording, I think
it is necessary to know when is the first blood/team fights/gankings/. It is
really bad to miss the first blood. It is not necessary to watch the whole
replay but knowing when to switch the screen is important. If you are missing a
lot of kills, your viewers will not be so happy about it. A good software to
use here is the DotA Replay Manager which pretty much save you the time to
watch the whole replay. Just google it, then you can easily find it online.

Step 3

Recording

Recording is the most important part. There
are several software (e.g. ViewletCam

Camtasia Studio, Fraps) online allowing to
record your screen. The one that I am using is Fraps. It does not matter which
software you use, they all have good avi file output. I recommend to set the
fps to 15 or 20 with half size. From my personal experience, 15 fps (half size)
will output a 4GB file everything 20mins. I suggest you to get at least 20GB
just for the recording part because Fraps really output good quality file which
is freaking huge. 15 fps (full size) will out a 4GB file every 10mins or less.
If you are using this setting, then get at least 50GB free disk space I think.

Step 4

Commenting

Before doing the recording, it is necessary
to do a research on the both teams especially which player is in which role.
During the commentary, there isn't a fix way to comment. There are few tips
here. Always comment on the following things, line-ups, creeps kills(carry),
item build, skill casting sequence, fog dodging, warding and much more to find
out yourself.

Step 5

Editing/Rendering

It is a painful process for me especially
the rendering part which usually takes up to half of hours. There is a lot of
video editing software out there as well, some are free and some needs to be
purchased. I will just name a few you want to try out. Microsoft Movie Editor,
Sony Vegas, Adobe Pr, Adobe After Effect. Some compressing software to test out
with, WinAVI Video Converter, Easy RealMedia Tools Sorenson Squeezeï¼ˆVP6, FFmpeg.
You can find respective tutorials of different video editing software and
manual for compressing software online so I will not be talking on how to use
them. One important thing I must say is that try to do a balancing between the
quality and file size.

Step 6

Uploading

There are tons of free video sharing
websites online. Youtube is one of the more popular ones but not the only one.
I suggest you to try out different sharing website before fixing into one.

There are few websites you can visit to watch some of the good examples of DotA Commentary videosYoutube - a tons of good DotA Commentary videos can be foundDotA Commentary - a collection of good DotA Commentary videos